James Romberger is an American artist and cartoonist known for his depictions of New York’s Lower East Side.
Romberger’s pastel drawings of the ravaged landscape of the Lower East Side and its citizens are in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

“The impacts of both pictures and words drive more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note.” -Milton Caniff I just read four of IDW’s collections of Terry and the Pirates back-to-back. They comprise one of the most gripping narratives I have seen in comics. They are essential reading for anyone...

Fear and suspense can be effectively created by the inference of the unknown. What is shown can be less harrowing than what is implied and then forms in the imagination of the reader. The late cartoonist Alexander Toth disliked drawing explicit horror and violence in the style of E.C., what he called “gore-gulping grind and...

Sammy Harkham’s Crickets #3 rivals in substance and importance two other comics that were published in a similar format: David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket #3 and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball #23. Harkham seems to be best known for editing the chameleonic, graphically revolutionary anthology Kramer’s Ergot and he has served his artistic community well with those efforts....

This month Drawn and Quarterly will publish Anders Nilsen’s massive graphic novel Big Questions, a book fourteen years in the making. Nilsen’s previous books have dealt with humans facing the unpredictability of the natural world. In Dogs and Water (2004), a boy makes his way across an expanse of desert to encounter a roaming pack...

Considered one of the only true punk cartoonists, Gary Panter is a tremendously influential underground cartoonist best known for a ragged, aggressive line and the wildly imaginative formal experimentation in his Jimbo graphic novels. This month Fantagraphics Books will release DalTokyo, a serial comic strip first produced by Panter in the 1980s, now collected in...

With the December publication of Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, Fantagraphics will bring the classic comics stories of cartoonist Carl Barks (1901-2000) to bookstores in a comprehensive collection of handsome, durable hardcovers. This first volume is actually the seventh in the series’ complete timeline. The publisher elected to debut the series with stories that...

This month sees the release of Pompeii, Frank Santoro’s historical graphic novel, published by PictureBox. I first noticed Santoro as a columnist at the innovative but now-defunct Comics Comics website. We initially began a correspondence based on his perceptive comments about color in comics, a crucial but probably least understood aspect of the medium. When...

Michael DeForge is one of the most striking and popular talents in alternative comics, as evidenced by his two Eisner nominations this year: for Best Single Issue (or One Shot) for Lose #4 and Best Digital Comic for Ant Comic. This month, publisher Annie Koyama’s innovative imprint Koyama Press is releasing the first trade paperback...

For the 2013 Best Picture Oscar-winner Argo, Jack Kirby’s Lord of Light artwork was omitted and his crucial role in the CIA’s rescue plot was downplayed and distorted, but that is only a part of the problem with the film. …History cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our...

New School by Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics Books, $39.99) I find Dash Shaw’s work to be strangely invigorating. I admit I had some reservations when I first saw the daunting heft of his Bottomless Belly Button, with its absurdly extended passage of a man running and profusely sweating, drawn in a style so crunchy that it...

First published on The Comics Journal: Paul Kirchner began his career at Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates in 1973 and he later served a tenure as an assistant to legendary cartoonist Wallace Wood. His own surreal, meticulously drawn comics were mostly seen throughout the seventies and eighties in slick magazines such as High Times, Heavy Metal...